Rich Hill and the Limits of Knowledge

Suppose the amount of human knowledge in the universe is finite. And suppose we happen to have reached the limit; we have acquired as much as we can. And suppose further that this applies to baseball, as well. What if we have learned as much as we can about pitching, for example, and there is no more knowledge we can gain, try as we might? It’s a silly supposition, of course: there’s lots more to study and learn and there always will be until we crash into the sun. But I present this thought experiment to you because it’s as close to a real explanation for Rich Hill’s recent dominance as I can get.

There’s a very real chance you have no idea what or who I’m talking about at this point, so please, let me back up. Rich Hill the pitcher is who, and his two starts wherein he’s recorded 20 total strikeouts, a single walk, and given up all of three runs in 14 innings is what. The what is brought up because it’s odd. How odd? There have been 97 games this year in which a starting pitcher went at least seven innings with at least 10 strikeouts and walked at most one batter. There have been 2,235 games played this season, so 97 represents just 4% of the total games. The fact that Hill did it once is interesting. The fact that he did it twice is just bizarre.

Making it more unusual is Rich Hill himself. None of the other pitchers in the 97-game sample were starting their first (or second) major league game since 2009. I didn’t look that up, I’m just assuming it. It feels safe. Further, there is no click box on Baseball Reference that says “threw 11 innings for the Long Island Ducks.” If there were and I clicked it, that 97 would drop to two. Hill is a failed starter and failed LOOGY reliever who was signed off the scrap heap because the major league team’s Triple-A affiliate needed someone who was not dead to throw innings as a starter. And now, this very moment, if you check the Red Sox website, Hill has the best ERA on the team behind two guys who have thrown a combined two innings. He also has the fewest walks of any pitcher except someone named Roman Mendez who has thrown, to date, 0.1 innings on the season. Rich Hill!

So this is strange, weird, freaky… pick your word. The Red Sox needed someone who could throw a baseball and got someone — and in doing so they accidentally signed someone who gave them two starts that, if you redact “Rich Hill” from the stat sheet, look like a they came from a player in line for tens of millions of free agent dollars this offseason. Is there any explanation for this? Let’s see if we can find one because finite human knowledge seems iffy.

First, it should be pointed out that pitching is, itself, rather strange. The FanGraphs pitching leaderboards show us that three of the top 10 starters this season were freely available pitching detritus at one point during recent seasons. If you expand to the top 12 you bring in Jacob deGrom, whom the Mets almost give to the Red Sox for Kelly Shoppach a couple seasons back. If a team had been smart/prescient enough it would have been exceedingly cheap to acquire Jake Arrieta, Dallas Keuchel, Corey Kluber, and deGrom and then basically win every game. The trick is determining the right Arrieta, Keuchel, deGrom, and Kluber to get beforehand. How do you pre-see a breakout?

But that unanswerable question moves us past Hill, who very likely hasn’t become a 200-inning ace off the strength of two September starts at the age of 35. So let’s hold that for another time and turn around. Hill’s problem has never been strikeout,s anyway. Even when he was a starter earlier in his career he got them at an above average rate. When he moved to the bullpen, he got even more of them, as one might expect. His problem was, as noted above, staying healthy — and, more germane to his on-field performance, walking batters. Outside of 2006 and 2007, when he was a starter with the Cubs, Hill has never had a walk rate of less than 10 percent in any season that he’s thrown more than 10 innings. So it should come as no surprise that part of Hill’s success in 2015 has been predicated on his ability to throw more strikes than previously — even his curveball, which has been his go-to out pitch. To date, 61% of Hill’s pitches have been in the zone. Compare that to a league average of about 48% and you can see how Hill would be successful, assuming of course his pitches weren’t hit. Which brings us to the PITCH f/x data. If he qualified, Rich Hill would have, according to Brooks Baseball’s movement numbers (thanks to Eno Sarris for his assistance):

1. The lefty curve with the third-most drop (to Clayton Kershaw and Gio Gonzalez) and the second-most horizontal movement (to Dallas Keuchel). Overall, Hill would be eighth in drop and fourth in cut.
2. The slider with the second-most drop (to Brett Anderson) and the 13th-most glove-side cut (as a lefty, behind only CC Sabathia and Chris Sale, in particular).
3. The highest curveball usage in baseball by 14 percentage points.

Here’s footage of the aforementioned curveball:

Moving forward, the questions become (a) can he replicate his pitches and (b) can he continue to throw them for strikes? The first question is answerable in a sense, by comparing the pitch data from Hill’s two starts. Here you can see the movement on Hill’s pitches in his two starts courtesy of Brooks Baseball (Note: for some reason Brooks’ labeling is off; the Tampa game, left, was on the 13th and the Toronto game, right, was on the 20th.)

Hill’s slider and curveball had far more movement in Tampa than they did in Toronto. Yet, despite the difference between facing the American League’s weakest lineup and its strongest, the results were the same.

This is the weirdness of pitching, and it helps answer as best we can the first question asked just before the image as well. Intrinsically, pitching is the beginning of an action. A pitcher creates a pitch and a batter acts upon that pitch. The pitcher gets to pick the type of pitch to throw and throw it, but after it leaves his fingers he’s as helpless to the coming result as those of us in the stands and watching on TV. The result is greatly impacted by the pitch he’s thrown, but that’s not the full story. The rest of the result, the other 60%, 50%, 40% or whatever number you think it should be, is the hitter, his skills, his biases, his lack of sleep last night, his fried chicken intake. Sometimes hitters have a bad day. Sometimes they have a great day. Sometimes they see a particular pitcher or a particular pitch very well or not very well. Sometimes they’ll hit anything, sometimes they’ll hit nothing.

The vagaries of baseball are most present in singular actions: throwing a ball, catching a ball, hitting a pitch. That is Rich Hill. He is 35 and a recent Long Island Duck. He has little business starting for any major league team and he also has 20 strikeouts in two starts over 14 innings. He is a flying, neon Vagary of Baseball. Or maybe he’s not. Maybe he’s discovered some way of pitching that is different than what he’s done before but looks almost exactly the same, and maybe he’s not mentioned it to any reporter, and it will transform him as it transformed Arrieta, deGrom, Keuchel, and Kluber. There’s no way to know. Hill’s pitches look excellent because he’s thrown them in the strike zone and because of their movement, and because of the way batters have reacted them, but there’s no guarantee batters will continue to act that way just as there’s little guarantee Hill can continue to thrown them in the strike zone.

Rich Hill is fun. He’s a blip on the pitching radar that we’ll all probably forget by next February when he signs his next contract, but Rich Hill pitching like David Price is a part of what makes baseball fun. The other part we’re still trying to figure out.